Skip to content

Distress Signal Melody

5 February 2011, 1:03 pm

When you hear a high G, does it Stress Out your Shit?

The international distress signal melody is a monotonal song in 7/8 time, written in the key of Morse Code, consisting of three quavers, followed by three crotchets, and another three quavers. Normally, the telegrapher is supposed to rest the equivalent note duration in between dits and dahs, but in an especially distressful signal, the beat is kept pulsing at the odd time of seven.

At a radio frequency of 500 kHz, the equivalent tone would be an high G7 (50175.4 Hz), an annoyingly high-pitched tone, and so is transposed down two octaves to a G5 in the widget above.

Here is a 45-second rock cover of “The SOS Song”. It is partly in free time to mimic the distress of a tattooing telegrapher, and features a 7/8 section as rescue efforts get mobilized. The choruses are rendered sailor-style, if not piratically derivative.

Morse code, like written music, is for the most part a dead language. While the commercial use of Morse code is just about obsolete, it is still a very powerful musical language that encodes simple rhythmic patterns into letters (and vice versa), and can be refashioned for much more esoteric forms of communication than relaying the massive bustling missives of business.

Tabla players, African Dummers, and other drumming cultures, speak in Percussionese dialects. However, rock drummers haven’t really much of a rhythmic vocabulary for their beats. We can refer to the style of the beats themselves―up-beat, down-beat, and possibly the African beat that they are based upon―the time signatures and tempos, and that vague quantifier of “feel”. We can speak in specifics―Dave Grohl flams and John Bonham triplets. But what if you were to describe a certain drum fill to someone? You’d be forced to dispense with all symbols, and just sing what it was you meant to say.

No longer friends. Now you can just say “Gimmie the D” in drumorse code.

Epilogue:

The Spring Peepers sing the same tone as the distress signal melody. Could they have provided the inspiration for SOS, in the way that the rhythms of the railways have been said to inspire Jazz beats?

The formula:

Frogs (G) + Railroads (Jazz) = Morse Code

Dah, Dah, Dah, Dit. Here’s some old timey porn.

Tagged , ,
Comments Off on Distress Signal Melody

Beep, Beep

26 January 2011, 11:58 pm

Traffic is the biggest brass band on the streets. In between swelling swooshes of many mediums, vehicles of every key sing onomatopoeic songs―car horn honks, backup truck beeps, klaxon awoogas, train choos, and bicycle bell brrngs―all day and all night and all afternoon, fading in and fading out, with timbres thrown back to the Jazz Era, when everything was a-beepin’ and a-boppin’ with syncopated stop-sign rests, and Doppler shift decays like the slide of a trombone on the very last ictus, into the howling road rhythms ahead.

The classic horn of popular automobiles (what you would call a honk as opposed to a beep) is tuned between a Major and Minor Third Interval. The oft-played double beat is like that of a Morse Code “A” (dit, dah (· —)), and was probably copied from railroad engineer beats. It can be notated as below: quaver, crotchet rest, crotchet, quaver rest, crotchet rest, assuming we’re in 4/4 time.


Minor Third = 300 cents
Car Horn Third = 362 cents
Major Third = 400 cents

It is not quite the happy Major Third , nor is it the sad Minor Third, but rather somewhere in between, a unique Car Horn Third, that evokes the spectrum of triadic emotions. At around 360 cents, almost halfway between Major and Minor, the Car Horn Third is similar to an Hendrix Chord which features both Thirds.

The car horn harmony was intentionally tuned like other Major Thirds in our American soundscape―the door bell, shop ding, and telephone dial tone―for its likeness to the third measure of the bell song Westminster Quarters. Ding, dong. The Major Third is found early in the Harmonic Series, making it a consonant interval, perfect for soothing the savage motorist.

Next we have the backup beep. Unlike the electric horn timbres of cars, trucks, buses, and ships, the backup beep is a pure sine wave, a series of F#6’s in an even crotcheted tempo.

If the Electric Tonic of America is a flatted B, then the F# reversal tone of trucks and buses forms a Perfect fifth interval―the Dominant. There are many different car horns, but the popular one above forms a Major 7th Interval with the Grid. Thus, the most popular chord of the streets is a B Major 7th. Everything is attuned according to the buzzing of the bees.

I like Traffic.

traffic

Tagged , , , ,
Comments Off on Beep, Beep

Quiet as a Quetzal at the Conquest

19 January 2011, 1:26 pm

The singing stairs of the pyramid have lost some fidelity over the centuries, as the once smooth plaster finish erodes from each step, but one can still hear the famous echoes reflected back from hand claps, like the chirps of the Resplendent Quetzal, a bird who, according to Mayan legend, represents the plumed serpent Quetzlcoatl. The chirpy staircase of El Castillo is just one of many feats of “frozen music” (what Goethe called architecture) at the Mexican site of Chichen Itza, that honor the bird and her snake-bird god. During the Equinoxes, there is an undulating shadow display at the pyramid, like the scioform of the feathered deity himself, crawling up and down the limestone steps, the same spot from where his echoic voice chirps to the applause of pilgrims. Here is a sample of two quetzal chirps, followed by two echoes of hand claps off the pyramid. Their sonograms are identical. Our modern method of polycarbonate sound reproduction seems primitive when compared to the Mayan stoner rock recordings of the ancients, that have been coded into the architecture with clap-on tech.

In the cloud forest, where the fog cover trumps vision, you are more likely to hear a Quetzal than see one. Their song is a plaintive kyow that is often compared to the whimper of a puppy. The kyows are performed in call and answer form by males and females (Remember this is the Neotropics where the girls sing too). They seem to follow a simple pattern, where alternating kyows fall in smaller intervals. The first call goes down a Perfect Fifth, and the smaller second call only goes down a Fourth. There are also high E Tones, like appoggiaturas, that precede each kyow.


In the ancient world, the biggest noise polluters were the birds, insects, and weather. Humanity paid much greater attention to the sounds around her. Echoes were believed to be the voices of spirits by many ancient cultures, and the Resplendent Quetzal and her invisible song is still regarded as “the spirit of Maya”.

Quetzals were venerated by the Pre-Columbian Mayans and Aztecs for their iridescent green plumage (and magical flying abilities). It was common for Mesoamerican nobility to sport quetzal feathers in their headdress, but because of the bird’s sacred status, it was a crime to kill them, and feathers were simply extracted (albeit inhumanely) before releasing the skylord back into the cloud forest. Today, quetzals are threatened to near extinction. They are known to kill themselves in captivity, rather than breed for our zoos.

According to legend, Quetzals used to sing beautiful songs, rivaling the Neo-tropic wren in musicality, but have remained silent ever since the Spanish Conquest, save for their whimpering kyows.

Kyowwwwwwwwwwwww….


Notes:
Lubman, David, ‘An archaeological study of chirped echo from the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza’, http://www.ocasa.org/MayanPyramid.htm, http://www.ocasa.org/MayanPyramid2.htm.

Tagged 
1 Comment

The Song of Speech

12 January 2011, 4:49 pm

There is a musical illusion, in which a spoken sentence is looped, until gradually, a subtle perceptual change occurs in the mind’s ear, and the words turn into tones, and the sentence becomes a melody. The illusion shows that there is no unique physical property of sound that accounts for a voice being perceived as spoken or sung.

Like the chicken and the egg and the proto-chicken, philosophers have long pondered the fine line between speech and song. When children speak, they are incredibly melodic, with large dynamic intervals, in constant songful dialogue with the world around them, until they grow up to be flat monotonal adults who can barley sharpen their pitchless questions. Some people retain their melodic speech, and are usually singled out for being overly dramatic, annoying, or just generally ridiculous-sounding, unless they happen to be the Dali Llama or what have you.

Thankfully, the Germans have a word for it―sprechgesang, meaning “spoken-song”. These days, music is as invasive as the recorded-word, and any sound of questionable tunefulness, will be auto-tuned, vocoded, recalyzed, and enslaved into song. On the other end, rapping revenges music, by spitting song back into speech.

Superfluous language, imprecise diction, mispronunciation, discourse particles, valspeak, casual swearing, and other verbal diarrhetics that are the scourge of old-guard academics, may actually serve a hidden musical function, as their misuse flourishes against all pedagogical efforts to the contrary. The musicality of language may trump such petty concerns for propriety and top-down standardization.

Every creative writing teacher since grade school has explicitly told me to avoid adverbs at all costs; literally [sic]. How else can I modify a whole goddamn sentence? Not everyone is so ultra-mod cool economical as to banish an entire part of speech. Those sorry old fools! Adverbs rule. Nothing peeves pedants more than the excessive use of adverbs, especially when they are flat-out wrong, as in the example below.





The adverb, “literally” is clearly not meant to be taken literally here, although the speaker doesn’t mean “figuratively” as it is commonly mistaken for, but rather something like “quasi-literally”, which doesn’t really mean much of anything, and barley modifies the thrust of the sentence. Yet, this is the way people talk, and it would seem that the bulk of useless adverbs we use, are there for a musical reason.

The classic “-ly” adverb in English, is what musicians would call a “triplet”―a tri-p-let―or a rhythmic figure of three beats. If the sentence above is put into an even 4/4 time signature, the adverb “literally” acts as a triplet lead-in to the predicate. Though it is actually a four-syllable word, the natural vowel clipping of linguistic evolution renders “literally” a swinging triplet, perfect for jazzing up our soliloquies. It acts like an ornament to a musical phrase, while not essential to its flavor, shapes and spices the spoken-song. The abominable adverb is like the musical segue, or the Kerouacian Dash―strung from sentence to sentence, decking his pages like Christmas―that may not mean anything, anymore than the stars in the sky, but help keep the beat of the conversation kicking.

To hear the musical illusion in the sentence above, a harmonic context is not necessary, only repetition is needed to reveal the latent melody. However, I added some accompaniment to demonstrate the fine line of song and speech, the proximity of the musical notation, and how any sentence can be made into a melody without some fancy pitch correction software.

“Literally in F# Phrygian”

There probably needs to be a brand new discipline to study all this nonsense―musicolinguistics, or whatsoever. The musicolinguists will show us how most everything we say can be reduced to meaningless musical ornaments, that gussy up a dysfunctional family of pronouns, and one or two verbs that we’ll get around to doing one of these days.

In Hip Hop, singing is girly. In Speech, melody is childish. In America, adverbs are despised. Can the musicolinguists literally save us from ourselves?

To hear an excellent example of sprechgesang, check out Devil Doll’s epic masterpiece “Mr.Doctor”. The eponymous singer is a master of spoken-song, sung-word.

Tagged ,
2 Comments

Devils in Love―The Major Seventh Augmented Fourth Chord

9 January 2011, 12:05 pm

Hey there friends. I’m feeling colloquial today, and downright anthropomorphic too. What do you say we leave behind all that non-human music for a while? And take a look at a snippet of some pure absolute holy humane musical holophones―not even sound really, just an idea that sings in your mind’s ear. I’ll use the second person on you, to get you nice and comfortable, so your cockles can be properly rocked. That’s not a sexual thing, your heart actually has cockles.

Anyway, there’s a Chord I’d like to give you. It’s called a Major Seventh Augmented Fourth. It sounds like the name they’d give an astronomical object, but really, you just gotta get to know some of these letter-named noteheads. If you spend some time with them, they will be like friends, the kind of friends that can drive you mad. A rose called by any alphanumeric string would smell as sweet. A Maj.7th (add #4): A pretty name for a pretty ruby red chord.



This chord is found in the A Lydian Mode (A B C# D# E F# G#), a major key with an augmented 4th. The five notes (A C# D# E G#) of the chord are themselves a Pentatonic Scale known as Japanese Insen, found in the popular “Cherry Blossom Song”.

There is emotion here too, intrinsic to tonal relationships. Allow me to personify.

The low A3 on the bottom of the chord, would be called the Root, or Tonic, and acts as King of the Chord. The Root is the selfy self, inside you and I, and establishes relationships with all other notes on top of her, her so-called friends. The high E5 on top is a strong personality in the score of your life, but also a jealous frenemy, for the E is Perfect Fifth and Dominant, ever seeking to usurp you, especially considering the Dominant’s tonal equivalence to the Lydian Mode (E Major = A Lydian). She’s you.

The C# is also a good friend, she makes you happy with her harmony, but considering her relative minorness (C# Minor = E Major = A Lydian), she can’t be trusted, as she also seeks to usurp your key and kingship, only to make things sad, as minor friends are wont to.

Next we have the G#―the Major Seventh. This friend is so close to you, she’s right on top of you, always. She longs to be near you, to become you, to resolve to you (at least it sounds like she does), and yet she stays right where she is. Perhaps you love her for her dissonance. If she was in charge of this tonality of yours, she’d make everything dark and evil with her freaky Phrygian mode, and nobody wants that. The Major 7th is the love-lorn loser tone. (For more, read this article.)

Lastly, there is the augmented fourth, the devilish D# Tritone. This tone is so awful that babies cringe in their cribs when played for them, and the church even tried to banish this hellish harmony from the face of the Earth. In a certain context the tritone can be a lusty angel―a real succubus of a friend who will suck you dry. Just as the G# longs to resolve to the A in the example above, the D# longs to resolve to the E, creating a double dissonant suspension that evokes the feeling of longing, languishing, lost in love. At the same time, the mystical forces of so many powerful tones hanging overhead, makes you oblivious to Key. Every antecedent is forgotten, and progression is no longer anticipated. The A and E, and the G# and D#, form Perfect Fifth intervals respectively, highly stable relationships, except the two sets of Fifths are but a semitone away (the smallest interval) from each other, far too close to be harmonious, the two couples are ever fighting. Combine the two fifths with the happy Major 3rd and the wistful Major 7th, and you get a desperate beautiful heartbroken chord who is somehow stable amidst the musical drama of her rocky tonal relationships.

The Major Seventh Augmented Fourth Chord is originally found in the Frank Zappa song “Zoot Allures”, and he probably took it from some modern composer no one knows any more. The Chord is also used in the Los Doggies’ song “Onebody”. Considering the amount of love songs out there, you’d think that this chord would be all over human music, but these days you’re lucky if you hear a Major 7th, let alone a Major 7th Sharp 4th.

I’m telling you, if you heard this little chord on the radio, in a fancy pop song, a Diatonic Heterosexual Song in 4/4, you’d absolutely fall in love with her. She’s the Devil.

Tagged , ,
3 Comments

Music of the Spheres

21 December 2010, 5:12 pm
At the atmosphere’s edge, where spiders, moments, gods, and all the other silent things live, the black noise―black as space, but golden as ever―travels on nothing to nowhere for light-years, like measures of rest that seem to last an entire score, it strips the babble off a baby, flattens wineglass song, and rips the screams out the maw of a dying animal, spreading uniformly forever, to its furthest reaches and depths, where here and there, the silence is greeted by giant humming rocks like hollow unstemmed noteheads, and singing stars that hum after death like posthumous box-sets, and the nervous noise of all sentient beings below, who rock themselves to death with death rattles and death growls, and rage, rage, rage with musical machines, against the dying of the light and sound.
In the distant Perseus cluster of galaxies, there is a black hole that emits a single note―a very low inaudible B-flat, 57 octaves below Middle C, with a frequency of 10 million years. While it’s true that space is a vacuum and for the most part your outer spacious screams would be as silent as God’s, there are stray bits of gas and dust that allow sound waves to travel. The gas around the Perseus cluster acts as a medium for the black hole’s sound waves to be measured.
  Drag over the B-flat on the left. If you hold the cursor in the center of the notehead, you’ll get sucked into the B-flat event horizon, which incidentally sounds like a Q Bass. If you move the cursor away from the notehead, the tone will decay, keeping the fabric of reality intact.

There are all sorts of hums out there in the heavens. The Earth makes a number of different hums―the Taos Hum and other regional drones that are only subjectively heard by certain people, the electromagnetic hum of the Schumann Resonance, the Electric Hum of Power Grids and other machines, and the chirps and whistles of the polar lights.


The Earth Tone is the keynote of our planet, except it isn’t a sound at all. It’s the pulsing of the Earth’s geomagnetic field. Lightning strikes in our atmosphere create standing waves in the extremely low frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (the kind of phenomena you can see). This is the same band our electric brains use. The frequency spectrum of the Earth’s magnetic field is identical to that of other organism’s brains when viewed on an electroencephalograph. The fundamental mode of the Earth is around 7-10 Hz, which is in the alpha band of our brains―a calm, and restful state of minds, allowing escape from the usual beta bustle. When converted into sound, the Earth’s tonic is a low B, two octaves below bass clef, and nine ledger lines below the staff. If you had antennae for ears, this is what you would hear all day―a Great Farting rising up from the crust, and fizzling down from the firmament.


It works like this you see:

dual nervous system

It seems the Universe is heavy on the B-Tones, at least on our pale blue dot. Not only does the Earth hum a low B, but the eighth overtone of the Earth is around 60 Hz―the same frequency that hums from the North American Power Grid―and now this black hole on the other side of the Universe is also humming a flatted B. Why the bees even buzz sharp B’s, and maybe their third eyes are receiving Persian waves. I wouldn’t be surprised, if it turns out the cosmos are a large holographic bassoon blown by some crazy alien who keeps us bound to Concert B-flat.

So get out there and fuck the silence kids! It’s time to go a-caroling…
After all, it ’twas Jingle Bells that ’twas the first song played in space. They say the spheres still vibrate in sympathy with that dashing little song.

Tagged , ,
Comments Off on Music of the Spheres

The Bleep

20 December 2010, 1:19 am

The motherfucking bleep tone is a high sharp B, and it sucks. Not even a real tone that you can tune to or anything, at 1000 Hz, it’s a quarter tone sharper than a B6, and as a single sine wave, sounds far more offensive than any profanity it masks. So fuck the bleep. Fuck it to death and fuck it back to life.

Tagged 
Comments Off on The Bleep
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »